The IT Nerd

Like most of you out there, I customize my Mac to meet my needs. And to do that, I am on the lookout for software that allows me to add some sort of functionality to my Mac. Sometimes very specific functionality. And I will be talking about three of those pieces of software today.

I’m going to start with Clyde which is an alarm system for your Mac. Here’s the scenario it’s designed for. You’re in a coffee shop with your MacBook and you need to go to the washroom. Sure you can ask some total stranger to watch your stuff. But that’s not going to guarantee that anything will get stolen. That’s where Clyde comes in. When you enable it on your MacBook and leave the lid open, it will lock the screen. If some criminal low life scumbag then tries to steal your MacBook, they are likely to close the lid to make it easier to escape with your MacBook. When they do that, a super loud alarm that they cannot disable will go off attracting attention. And when I say super loud, I mean it. On top of that, you will get an alert and a phone call on your iPhone and Apple Watch. That way you can stop the scumbag from escaping, assuming that others haven’t beaten the scumbag senseless. It’s $9 one time purchase, but there is also a free version that simply has the alarm. I’d invest in the $9 version as that’s cheaper than a new MacBook.

Next up is MonitorControl which is a free app. Its job is to control the brightness of non-Apple displays via an icon on the menu bar. It works quite well for those of us who run multiple monitors on our Macs like I do as I don’t have to fiddle with the buttons on the monitor if I want to adjust something. Brightness control of non-Apple monitors is something that macOS doesn’t do out of the box which makes this free app handy. Though I suspect that Apple will “Sherlock” this feature as that’s what Apple does.

The final app that I’d like to talk about is AppCleaner. This is a free app that cleanly uninstalls Mac applications that don’t have an uninstaller. Which is most apps for the Mac. The thing with Mac apps is that they scatter bits and pieces of themselves all over your hard drive. So even if you if you get rid of the main application, something is guaranteed to be left behind in some odd place on your hard drive. AppCleaner solves that problem for me. Which is important as I am often trying pieces of software for my clients, and I don’t want my hard drive cluttered with the bits and pieces of apps that I don’t use.

Are there apps that help you to customize your Mac to fit your needs? If there are, please leave a comment and feel free to share them.

This entry was posted on January 27, 2024 at 8:14 am and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.